Just two days ago, I was on my way home after spending an exhilarating long weekend in London and Amsterdam with researchers of language, linguistics, and culture (at Baraza at SOAS), when I found myself totally turned around in Manchester Airport. Which way to go after passport control? To transfer to another flight? The signage was confusing.

Ordinarily, I would've felt pretty lame about it, but then I also noticed another person angling back and forth between the signs/words printed on doors 1 and 2, with a look of confusion similar to my own. I turned to ask him where if he was on the same flight as me. When he didn't vocalize in reply, but instead used a variety of Sign Language, and gestured to show me a message he'd typed in English into the Notes feature on his iPhone,  I realized that not only was he from my same flight, but that he was also Deaf.

It also dawned on me that this same guy had earlier just been at the Passport Control desk adjacent to me in line, when we had thanked the UK Border Force officer with by gesturing his hand away from in mouth in a sign I recognized as "thank you." Now that we both stood in the airport between doors 1 and 2, the task became about how we would both get to our next flight, as both of us were heading stateside. My new friend tapped his wrist, as if pointing to the time, and indicated that we had only a short while before our next flight. Uh oh. With only limited time, how would we communicate to solve our problem?

By Jamie A. Thomas

For my seminar this week, I arranged a visit to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We've been engaging with 19th century discourses of humanity, difference, and the body, and I wanted us to get out of the classroom to interact with materials from that time period. We were lucky enough to get up close and personal with human remains amassed (problematically) by Philadelphia physician Samuel G. Morton in the mid-1800s. These labelled skulls are now part of the eponymous collection researched and conserved by the Penn Museum. 

All semester long in my seminar, Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies, I've been guiding students through perspectives in critical discourse analysis and a range of discursive representations of humanity and the Other. We began with the Wild Man of the European Renaissance and traced the genealogy of this idea to the contemporary framing of Bear Grylls and his Man vs. Wild television series. Next, we began to explore Darwinian paradigm as it relates to our radicalized, gendered, and classist ideas of civilization, competition, and primitivism. We discussed the life and times of Nathaniel  Isaacs, Saartje Baartman, the implications of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the Haitian and African origins of the zombie. Our next moves will be to examine the notion of the zombie in the context of Henrietta Lacks' immortal (and undead) cells, and the language and visual discourse of Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  

The way I see it, there's no studying the zombie without equally examining (1) what we think makes us human and (2) our fears of death, dying, and reanimation. What better way to enhance our study than to interact with a massive collection of human skulls? Admittedly, it was a bit creepy to be in a room surrounded by the ossified remains of hundreds of people I could never know. But, we were oriented by our immensely knowledgable guide, Penn Museum specialist, Paul Mitchell...  ​

Following the trend of mash-ups between history, literature, and the supernatural, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes the British classic by Jane Austen and adds in a zombie-fighting quest. The love story between Jane and Mr. Bingley, and between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, unfolds against a backdrop of a zombie outbreak that is rapidly taking over England. In the end, Darcy and Elizabeth overcome their initial impressions of each other and work together to minimize the spread of the outbreak.

In the movie, viewers see hundreds of zombies that constantly hunt for brains while being hunted down themselves. Historically, this stems from the Haitian belief, in which zombies came in multiple forms: They were spirits stolen by magicians, humans who willingly became zombies, or mindless servants of their zombie creator. In American society, however, the historical appeal of the zombie initially came largely from the creature's lack of autonomy. Many even considered zombies to be the ideal slaves, since they could work for long hours and survive on minimal amounts of food. This characterization of the zombie as a mindless corpse is what the American public is most familiar with today.

By Jamie A. Thomas

In the seminar course I'm teaching this semester, we'll be attending a movie theater showing of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) next week. This in mind, my goal has been to prepare my students for a critical examination of the film by studying concurrent 19th century discourse. Jane Austen's novel was originally published in 1813, the same time in which European colonial expansion was underway, slavery in the U.S. (and Americas) was reaching its zenith, and modern linguistics and anthropology were also taking shape. Other texts from this historical period include Nathaniel Isaacs' Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, Vol. 1 (1836), famous for its (now debunked) descriptions of King Shaka Zulu, as well as Solomon Northrup's (1853) autobiographical account (now feature film) Twelve Years a Slave, and Charles Darwin's Descent of Man ​(1871).

As I critically examine key examples of thought and discourse from this period together with my students, we are additionally drawing crucial connections to the rise of the zombie in U.S. American popular culture. This week, we examined excerpts from each of Isaacs' and Darwin's popular pieces. This was for my ongoing Spring 2016 course, Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies. In class, I guided students in using critical discourse analysis to examine these important texts.

By Jamie A. Thomas